With the increased emphasis on the minimizing of air polluting and noise polluting gasoline type engines, there has been a revived interest in the use of electric motors for propelling vehicles and operating other types of equipment that were formerly propelled and operated by gasoline type engines. Vehicle engines powered by electric motors, as such, are not new and there have been electric automobiles, and other vehicles, such as golf carts around for many years. However, most of such approaches use voltage from a battery or other direct current source which directly operates a rotating shaft, resulting in a terrific drain on the batteries with the attendant significant limitation in the range of such vehicles.
One approach which limits the drain on the batteries and increases the range of the vehicle is the use of the batteries to activate one or more solenoids, the iron rod or plunger of which is caused to reciprocate responsive thereto. The reciprocation of the plunger of the solenoid is caused to operate a drive shaft as is illustrated in the Gelnaw U.S. Pat. No. 2,056,719; the Bock U.S. Pat. No. 424,535; and the Moodyman U.S. Pat. No. 1,886,040. While an improvement to the direct approach discussed hereinabove, there are still several disadvantages to the solenoid approach which include: frictional losses between the plunger and the coil as the plunger reciprocates; relatively weak magnetic flux field limits power output; the magnetic attraction acts only over a portion of the entire plunger at any one time; and the pulling and pushing force is relatively inconsistent depending upon the position of the magentic plunger within the flux field. As a result, such approaches have not been successful for the movement of relatively large vehicles where the application of significant force is required and have been limited to rather small pumps as illustrated in the Morgan U.S. Pat. No. 3,134,938.